Maybe More of the Brightest Should Eschew Wall Street

Terry Duffy's call for talent to return to Wall Street is misguided.

Oct. 7, 2013 4:46 p.m. ET

Terry Duffy's call for talent to return to Wall Street is misguided ("Wall Street Is Losing the Best and Brightest," op-ed, Sept. 30). Just look at how engineers fled the auto industry in the '70s and were attracted to the defense industry during the Cold War. The result was badly engineered and overpriced cars and an industry that almost went under.

Similarly, bright graduate students today can see that the financial industry is selling bad products with little intrinsic economic value to society, except to make commissions for itself. It has earned its stigma. Therefore the really bright folks are looking for other venues like Silicon Valley in which to build their careers. What the finance industry needs to do isn't to market itself better to graduates, but to make better products with true societal benefits, and not with gimmicks that only feed the industry itself.

The auto industry's comeback is the place to learn how to do that, and in the process attract bright and young graduate students again. The bailout for both industries should have been a wake-up call for the financial industry, but only the auto industry seems to have understood that.

Mikael Dan Bergman

Santa Monica, Calif.

Mr. Duffy's impassioned plea for the best and the brightest college graduates (read Harvard) to flock again to Wall Street is appallingly myopic. The world needs the brightest minds to solve its most pressing problems, to imagine new things in technology, the healing arts and the humanities—not to figure out ways to game financial markets or to create algorithms that turn out to be treasure maps for fools' errands.

Mr. Duffy dreams that M.B.A.s in the past flocked to Wall Street because they were "passionate about changing the world with a powerful idea." That's like saying that most readers of Playboy subscribe for the articles. It's a good thing that the best and the brightest are going elsewhere for their careers.

Steven Horwitz

Moraga, Calif.

Why not recruit some Aggies from Texas A&M? They certainly have a lot more horse sense than the elitists who continue to destroy our country with their arrogant certainties.

Steven Morris

East Hampton, N.Y.

The really great news is that now America's brilliant grads can apply their talent to the creation of new innovations and industries and bring America back to the country we were before the Wall Street financial engineering that led to the crash.

The best and the brightest tend to be the most incompetent. You don't need to look at Wall Street. Look also at the government. The problem is that those who've always been told they are among the best and the brightest tend to insist that their way is the only way. That leads to central planning, which unfortunately is an inherently flawed concept. Better to let markets decide these things instead of giving power to those who supposedly know what they are doing.

" the finance industry needs to ... make better products ... not ... gimmicks that only feed the industry itself. "

Financial complexity is best known as a barter economy, the finance industry is the inevitable result of the nation having no standard of value, no real money, serves no purpose but laundering fiat money. The finance industry is a low-value aberration resulting from the low-value of fiat money. The digital age invites commerce like never before, the value of non-fiat money is higher than ever. Restore the gold dollar.

Did it ever dawn on these geniuses that if the best and brightest were on Wall Street, that maybe things WOULD improve?

Without investment accounts, retirement accounts, etc., no one would be able to retire. So yuck it up, letter writers, because if you had your way, you'd have to live off the land in your 80's just to survive.

Laugh all you want, but the simple fact is that Wall Street has been one of the preferred destinations of "the best and the brightest" for decades. There is ZERO evidence to suggest that those attending the Ivy League schools now are any smarter or more proficient than those who did so 10 or 20 years ago. And THEY are the ones who created the financial crisis.

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